Live from Austin!

On average, computers last me for about 4 years. Last week, I was still using an 800MHz iMac.

Partly this is down to my being frugal. It’s like the TV situation, where I didn’t buy the HDTV until my family visited and laughed at the 20″ TV, and seemingly made it die of shame shortly afterwards.

Partly it’s because Macs remain usable longer than PCs. A PC Magazine survey found that Macs tend to last 3.9 years on average, compared to 2.4 years for Windows PCs. (Of course, with Linux you can keep an old machine usable for even longer.)

Partly, though, it was because I wasn’t wild about any of Apple’s offerings. The Mac Pro is too big and expensive. The current iMac is unergonomic and (in my view) ugly. The Mac Mini is too limited. The MacBook Pro series used ATI graphics. I was going to wait, and maybe get a plain MacBook as a kind of stopgap, more by a process of elimination than as a matter of choice.

Then Apple revved the MacBook Pro. They ditched the ATI graphics, and put in an LED backlit display in the 15″. I was sold. So, I have a shiny new Mac.

One advantage of making computers last 4 years is you really notice the upgrade when it comes. Going from a 16MHz B&W Mac to a 180MHz PowerPC color Mac was awesome. The switch to a wide screen and dual core CPU is almost as good. I can leave GraphicConverter optimizing PNG files, and the machine stays totally usable. Mail also flies with multiple threads able to run in parallel.

I use each upgrade as a cue to go through my files and clear up. I move old stuff to CDs, make my folder structure more consistent, get rid of cruft, and so on. This time there’s a lot to throw away, because any PowerPC Mac software I was keeping around is now obsolete. One problem area is PhotoShop Elements, because Adobe still haven’t got an Intel native version. The PowerPC one will run under emulation, but I’d rather wait for Adobe to get their act together.

On the plus side, now I can go try all the cool stuff that has appeared in the last year or so, that was too CPU-intensive for my old machine. And maybe do an official Red Pill Intel release.

When Apple launched Mac OS X, they made a big thing about its typographical capabilities. To show off the new type rendering engine, they licensed and bundled…

More than $1,000 of the best fonts available today, including Baskerville, Herman Zapf’s Zapfino, Futura, and Optima; as well as the highest-quality Japanese fonts available, in the largest character set ever on a personal computer.

It’s interesting to contrast this with Microsoft’s approach. Back when they launched Windows, they needed some fonts too. Since every laser printer on the planet (and most non-laser printers) had Helvetica and Times in, it would have been really useful if Windows had had Helvetica too. Macintoshes at the time shipped with Times and Helvetica, and it enabled them to display on screen a reasonable facsimile of what you would get on printout.

Of course, doing what Apple had done and actually licensing the fonts wasn’t an option. Bill Gates didn’t get to be as rich as he is today by paying people for the use of their intellectual property. Instead, Microsoft got a couple of knock-off fonts made by Monotype that were close enough—Times New Roman and Arial. In the case of Arial, the emulation was painstaking, right down to using the exact same character and stroke widths for every symbol.

Much the same happened with Microsoft Office. Microsoft saw a font they rather liked—Hermann Zapf’s Palatino—so they called in Monotype to make a quick copy. The result was named Book Antiqua, and bundled with Office.

Unlike Helvetica, however, Palatino was a wholly original design by a living designer. Hermann Zapf got rather angry, and Microsoft agreed to license Palatino retrospectively.

With Microsoft, history has a way of repeating itself. The forthcoming (some day) Windows Vista has a font called Segoe, used for all user interface elements. Microsoft recently filed for a visual trademark on Segoe, to try and ensure that nobody else would be able to use the font in their logotypes or software. Because, you know, everyone wants the caché of looking like Windows.

Unfortunately, some spoilsports at Linotype noticed that Segoe (as shipped in the Vista betas) was almost identical to the font Frutiger Next, designed in 1997 by Adrian Frutiger for use on signage in Munich. Microsoft had tweaked the tail on the ‘Q’, added a baseline to the ‘1′, left everything else identical, and then filed for a trademark as if the font was their own original design.

The European Union denied the application. Microsoft attempted to appeal, arguing that Linotype hadn’t actually sold Frutiger Next. Unfortunately, Frutiger is a very popular font, and the evidence of its Next variant’s existence prior to 2005 was overwhelming. Denied! Microsoft must pay all the lawyers’ fees for Heidelburger Druckmaschinen AG, aka Linotype.

Frutiger is very similar to Adobe Myriad, designed by Robert Slimbach and Carol Twombly. Consensus seems to be that Myriad is original enough to not be considered a rip off, however. Myriad is used by Apple for their corporate publications (replacing Apple Garamond), and is also used by my team at IBM. It’s worth noting that Apple license the font from its owners, and I use a legal licensed copy too.

So…will Microsoft license Frutiger or Myriad? Or will they tweak Segoe some more?

If you search Google for “Welcome to Adobe GoLive”, you’ll get a ton of matches for web sites which were set up by people too incompetent to change the default text in the GoLive web site template.

Ironically, the current #1 match is a web site containing cracked serial numbers for Adobe products.

A while back, Adobe sued Macromedia for patent infringement. Adobe had a software patent on customizable tabbed palettes.

Macromedia responded by countersuing Adobe for using some stuff they had patented, including blended colors and visual editing of waveforms.

Adobe won their lawsuit, and got a judgement of $2.4m. Bet they thought they were pretty smart, huh?

Well today, Macromedia won the countersuit, and got a judgement of $4.9m. Bwahaha.

Macromedia’s Fireworks quickly surpassed PhotoShop for creation of web graphics. It’s also a quarter of the price. In fact, you can buy the entire Corel graphics suite for less than the price of just PhotoShop. However, Adobe are the market leaders, and a lot of snobbish graphic designers won’t use anything else, so clearly Adobe thinks they have a license to price-gouge and attempt to prevent competition using the patent system. Nice to see them get a dose of comeuppance.

Quote from Macromedia’s press release: “The score is now Adobe one, Macromedia one, customers zero.”

Well, it was 36 celcius in the shade at 18:00. Apparently we’ve gone straight from winter to summer and skipped spring; a week ago it was regularly sub-zero.

I got a really good deal on Corel Graphics Suite, via Big Blue. It’s buggy, but it’s OS X native, so occasional crashes aren’t a huge deal. It has full alpha channel support, transparency, and the preview engine of CorelDraw seems to use Quartz! Given that Adobe want $500 for an OS X version of PhotoShop, I think I’ll pass on that for now.

Some product at IBM was sent out with documentation that had been automatically translated to German by software. Unfortunately, when given the text:

In order to read the user documentation, you must have Adobe Acrobat Reader installed on your computer. If it is not installed, you will receive an error message.

…it carried out a rather literal translation of “Adobe Acrobat Reader” and “user documentation”. The result, back-translated through Babelfish, was:

In order to regard the guidance of the user, you must have clay brick express dancers the reader program, which is installed on your computer. If it is not installed, receive an error message.

Clay brick express dancers, the reader program. I must remember that one.